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Jobs limiting applicants to just three letters

Brian Leiter

Philosopher Barbara Herman (UCLA) writes:

As Placement Director, I'm seeing an issue that's of general interest.  A number of schools, either because of the structure of Interfolio or their own online application systems, are only accepting three letters of reference for job applicants.  They are giving no guidance about whether they are expecting the applicant to include a teaching letter, or want only research letters.  Some of these schools respond to inquiries about this state of affairs with surprise and then say they will accept more letters by email.  Some others in effect shrug.  Very active or well-connected placement directors are able to get more attention for their students.  That's good, but hardly fair.  Since you reach a great many programs through your blog, I wondered if it might be of use to call attention to this so that schools might work towards being more uniform or at least more informative about their practice.

I'm grateful to Prof. Herman for raising this problem.  Comments are open for suggestions or for hiring departments to clarify their policies, as the case may be.

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20 responses to “Jobs limiting applicants to just three letters”

  1. David Vessey

    At Grand Valley State we are limited by HR's new online job application software. I've asked them to increase the number of references applicants can list, but no changes have occurred yet. In the meantime, if an applicant lists more than three references in his or her cv I, as the search chair, manually override the application program and add the additional names and contact information. That way requests for letters will go out to everyone the applicant lists as references on his or her cv.

    Reply
  2. Daniel Kaufman

    Applicants to our program are also required to submit letters through our HR departments online portal — hence the uselessness of Interfolio and other letter services — and what I'm understanding from talking to friends in administration at other schools, this is going to be true at more and more places.

    Our system also limits candidates to three letters. Individual departments really have no say whatsoever with regard to this. And there is no way to manually add more. We make this very clear to applicants, whenever we advertise a job.

    Reply
  3. Jon

    Ours, too, also an HR issue. And some of these other proposals to have free letters sent from online services (e.g., MARGY) are non-starters given our HR requirements.

    I think this is generally a situation where what's "obvious" just isn't accommodated by institutional practices.

    Reply
  4. Onthemarket

    I'm confused why you think Interfolio and other letter services are made useless. Many (most?) applicants, I believe, are filling the e.g. Interfolio address of their LoR into the online portal instead of their reference's actual email. One simple reason is no one wants to bother their references with scores of letter requests. Interfolio allows them to upload their LoR once and then the applicant can have it sent automatically through e.g. Interfolio. Most jobs I've applied to request letters through HR portals and Interfolio has always worked just fine for me. Am I missing something?

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  5. Daniel Kaufman

    No need to be confused. Those third party services don't work with our system. This was a huge issue on our last job search, and applicants were very angry. Unfortunately, there isn't anything I could/can do about it.

    Reply
  6. Onthemarket

    This is a huge issue indeed. Some recommenders ONLY work with Interfolio. If that's one your most important reference, then either you make them angry by asking them to upload their letter to your system or you skip the job app altogether? For the record I applied to your job last year and used Interfolio. No one told me the letters didn't go through. As far as I knew they did. If they effectively didn't, and my app, like others, was not considered for that reason, then perhaps it'd be wise to fix this before generalizing about applicants qualifications.

    Reply
  7. Daniel A. Kaufman

    Onthemarket:

    Perhaps you missed the part, where I explained that there isn't a single thing any faculty can do about the way HR designs and implements its application procedures. So, your last bit of snark is rather misplaced. This is the system we actually have and we have to work within it. I'm afraid then that we still will have to make judgments about applicants' qualifications, imperfect as the system is.

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  8. Recent applicant

    I encountered this problem recently as a candidate. My workaround was to have my department administrator compile excess letters into a single PDF, so that Letter 1 was Reviewer 1, Letter 2 was Reviewer 2, and Letter 3 was Reviewers 3, 4, … n. Not sure if this bothered anyone but it circumvented the issue.

    Reply
  9. Onthemarket

    Dan, I am not blaming you. I didn't say that *you* should fix the process. Still, someone has to. Whether faculty have any leverage, I have no idea. But, given that this is happening, whatever judgments you will have to make will be about the qualifications of *only a subset* of the applicants' pool. Hence, you cannot generalize. The sample is biased by a totally arbitrary feature/bug of the system. Maybe that's fine for hiring purposes. But that's not fine as a picture of the qualifications of job applicants these days.

    Reply
  10. Brian Leiter

    I'm sure DK can agree that it would be better for what is apparently the university-wide system not to have this problem. But that is wholly separate from whether or not he has enough evidence to judge the qualifications of job applicants, so I think we should drop that from this discussion. Even if not all letters from some applicants get through, plenty of applications are coming in and it is on this basis, I take it, that DK offered a judgment about the suitability of graduates of certain schools for teaching at Missouri State.

    Reply
  11. Daniel A. Kaufman

    And what I am telling you is that reality intrudes on the ideal. You say we cannot generalize, and yet that is exactly what we do and what we have to do. Generalize as to the quality of our applicant pool, on the basis of the information we have. We make it very clear to applicants that they references must be submitted through the online portal, and that's pretty much all we can do.

    Not only is this not going to change, but more and more schools are switching to this model, as has been indicated to me by several well-placed administrators I know at several schools around the country. (And by others, here, when the topic has come up, as it has several times.) You can inveigh against the injustice of this, but if you want to succeed in the actual — as opposed to the ideal — job market, you will have to take these sorts of realities into account. Whether or not it's "fine" as per some valuation of yours, no matter how reasonable it may be, is, quite honestly, irrelevant.

    Reply
  12. Daniel A. Kaufman

    Yes, Brian, of course I agree to your first sentence. I argued with my HR department bitterly about this.

    Reply
  13. Onthemarket

    I don't think we disagree that much, I don't doubt DK had all the evidence needed to pass judgment, and I'm fine with setting this aside. The question is whether applicants are being prevented from uploading letters without knowing so. That's the important point I'm making. Being prevented from uploading more than 3 is one thing. Not having any letter go through is quite another. Everyone knows they have to use the online portal. But then DK said it's not compatible with Interfolio and I'm still confused how that is. Daniel, do you mean letters sent through Interfolio have not actually been received even if the portal tells you they have? Because that would be very confusing. All online HR portals, as far as I know, can receive Interfolio letters. Again, if there's a bug here I think it's important for applicants that this be clarified.

    Reply
  14. David Wallace

    Genuine question: is there really need for candidates to have >3 letters? I've been rather surprised at the profusion of letters in the US: in Oxford, there was a hard limit of 2 or 3 in the application rules, not through any HR constraint but just to keep application material manageable (in the same way that there's a length limit on writing samples and research proposals). I could easily be persuaded that allowing arbitrary letters is good but I'd be interested in hearing how the case goes.

    Reply
  15. anonymous junior faculty

    I'm a little confused about how the third party systems (or at least, interfolio) couldn't work with an online portal system. Interfolio doesn't just email letters to email addresses provided for them. They also have a service which signs into an online portal and uploads letters for you. What I'm confused about is how the system could tell that it was interfolio doing this, and not the letter writer themselves. I'm not very technologically savvy, so I'm not saying that this is impossible, but am curious what the issue is. Is it that some systems are just too complicated and interfolio refuses to go into the system and do it? I never encountered this when I was on the market–if I remember correctly, it's a bit pricier to have interfolio go into the portal vs. just send the emails–but that was the only difference I remember encountering.

    Reply
  16. Taleo

    Jon and DK (and anyone else with these restrictive HR policies).

    1, Do your HR departments use Taleo? We switched recently to Taleo, and I'm unsure whether it will allow letters be uploaded via 3rd party sites. I'm also unsure if applicants can upload more than three. If not Taleo, do you know the relevant system?

    2. Is HR preventing letters being uploaded from 3rd parties for any specific reason? My university, a public 4 year, is concerned about validating letters. We currently are required to double check the references are authentic before we extend the offer to the successful candidate. That consists in a call or email to the successful applicants' letter writers. I could see our HR department barring 3rd parties from uploading letters if the issue is about authenticating the references.

    Reply
  17. Sergio Tenenbaum

    Most jobs in the North American market are interested in both the research and teaching skills of the job candidate. So here's a situation in which three letters are not enough: someone is a VAP for one year and has been very research active. They might have then a teaching letter from someone in their PhD department and a letter from someone who can attest to their full-time teaching in the new position. These are often two very different perspective on someone's teaching (someone who might have mentored the candidate in relation to their teaching, and someone who has seen the student in this new, but more typical, employment situation). Similarly, the person might have gone to conferences and made new contacts in the profession during this year. A letter from the supervisor who knows the work very well and someone who might have seen less of the candidate's work but is "arms-length" in the person's area will give very different perspectives on the person's research. But this is already four letters.

    More generally, I find it often helpful to have three letters on the candidate's research, especially if one of them is not by one of their teachers. And this is especially true if they're working in multiple areas or they're doing interdisciplinary work and have a letter from someone not in philosophy. Again, if you add a teaching letter, this is already a total of four.

    At least in some places in the UK, letters are not used in the "first cut", so this is less of an issue in those placess.

    Reply
  18. recent grad

    Most SCs ask for one writing sample. Candidates send them their best one. If the SC wants to read more, then they can ask or search online. I think the same applies to letters. Send your best three. If a SC wants to read more, they can ask you, or the people listed on your CV, or your department assistant (whom you should list on your CV too). Don't know which three are your best three? Ask your advisor which three you should send if you can only send three. They can answer without undermining confidentiality.

    Reply
  19. Geoff

    Regarding the inability to upload letters via Interfolio, it seems to me that this really isn't the fault of hiring committees. That said, I would suggest that the best practice, moving forward, would be for search committees to mention in their advertisements whether or not letters can or cannot be submitted via dossier services.

    Relatedly, many job candidates face the dilemmas of submitting a "stock" letter from a famous reference who will not tailor, or a tailored letter from a reference who is not as well-known. This is already a difficult decision for many candidates to make, and anything that can be done to make that decision easier for a given application could be very helpful.

    Reply
  20. Ken Taylor

    There is less of an issue here than meets the eye. Interfolio asks you to set a REQUIRED number of letters. In our case that is 3. If you set that number higher — say to the maximum number of letters you will allow— it won’t count the file complete until you reach that number. BUT it allows departments to check yes or no to the question “Allow candidates to submit additional documents”. In our case, we have checked yes. So candidates are free to submit additional letters, without limit, as additional documents. I suspect the same is true for many other departments. So I think the real problem here may be a matter of not completely transparent interface design and a little careless reading on the part of users. We’ve gotten a half dozen desperate queries about this. But most candidates seem to have figured it out on their own. We looked at what candidates see on interfolio and it isn’t super hard to figure out. I guess the design failing is that the additional documents tab doesn’t specifically mention additional letters of recommendation beyond the required three without which the file would be marked as incomplete.

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